It's easy to take air for granted: of course we have to; otherwise we could only think of each breath.
But what we breathe shapes our futures.
Air quality has far-reaching impacts on people's health, economic prospects, and quality of life as a whole. In our project, we propose to look to tell a cohesive story of how air quality is linked with seemingly-disaperate metrics.
Learn more ↓This (below) graph visualizes the ratio of rated-'good' AQI days to the total number of measured days that each county had in 2022. It's important that this is a ratio and not a nonweighted number because each county has a different number of days on which AQI was measured.
Los Angeles and the surrounding Inland Empire stand out as having had particularly poor air quality in 2022, dropping well below the bounds of the color scale. San Bernadino County had a jaw-droppingly low 0.13 days with a 'good' AQI per measured day. Its life expectancy, as will be seen in the next graph, appears to suffer as well, falling one or two years short of its neighbors. Other pockets of poor air quality emerge around Colorado's Front Range, which suffers particularly from ozone pollution, areas in and around the manufacturing-heavy Rust Belt, and pockets of the southern part of the country (particularly around Texas).
This choropleth shows, as you might expect, average life expectancies for each county, which were averaged from their contained census tracts.
Most notably, the South has significantly lower life expectancies than the rest of the country. But the Rust Belt area, which as mentioned experiences lower air quality as well, similarly sees lower life expectancies. Detroit, again, stands out, especially in relation to its neighbors.
Here's another way of looking at the link between life expectancy and air quality: plotting them directly in relation to one another.